31 May 2008 7:02 PM

Why is it that nobody in our own elite actually likes or understands this country or its people or its traditions?

Why did we have to wait for Bishop Michael Nazir-Ali, born and raised in Muslim Pakistan, to remind us that, as he put it, ‘the beliefs, values and virtues of Great Britain have been formed by the Christian faith’?

Just as important, why did we have to wait for him to urge us to do something about restoring that faith before we either sink into a yelling chaos of knives, fists and boots, or swoon into the strong, implacable arms of Islam?

Most of our homegrown prelates are more interested in homosexuality or in spreading doubt about the gospel or urging the adoption of Sharia law.

Then again, why did it take the French President, Nicolas Sarkozy, to explain to us that our parliamentary system was the best guarantee of liberty in the world and to remind us of the courage and valour of our people in war?

This is not what British leaders say or even think, not least because they are busy pulling the constitution to pieces.

It is not what our children are taught in schools.

In fact, any expression of national pride is viewed with suspicion by the state, by the education system and above all by the BBC.

It was not always so. Half a century ago, we had churchmen, broadcasters, academics and military men who thought it normal to love their own country, normal to support the Christian faith which made us what we are, and were willing to defend it.

The question of what happened in the years between is one of the most interesting in history.

We know, thanks to their endless memoirs and the dramas about them, that this country’s foreign and intelligence services were maggoty with Communist penetration.

I am sometimes tempted to wonder if the same organisation targeted both political parties (especially the Unconservatives), the Church of England, the BBC, the Civil Service, the legal profession and the universities.

The Communist leader Harry Pollitt certainly urged his supporters back in the Forties to hide their true views and work their way into the establishment.

An organised conspiracy could not have done much more damage than whatever did happen.

We have a country demoralised in every sense, its people robbed of their own pride, its children deprived of stability and authority, terrifyingly ignorant of their own culture, its tottering economy largely owned from abroad, its armed forces weak, its justice system a sick joke, its masses distracted by pornography, drink and drugs, its constitution menaced, its elite in the grip of a destructive, intolerant atheism. Ripe, in fact, for a foreign takeover.

The BBC's scorn for Whitehouse, a true suburban warrior

What a nasty, sly programme the BBC made about Mary Whitehouse. Bafflingly, the drama, starring Julie Walters as the TV campaigner, was billed and previewed as being ‘fair’ to her.

Not a bit of it. It was one long Left-liberal sneer, crammed with callow, adolescent innuendoes and infused with standard BBC scorn for the suburbs. It featured a completely contrived and incredible use of the c-word, which I thought was still pretty much banned from mainstream TV.

And while it took great trouble to kit Miss Walters up with hats and spectacles to look as much like Mrs Whitehouse as possible, it portrayed her chief rival, the arrogant BBC Director-General Sir Hugh Carleton Greene, as a handsome devil, a bit of a rake.

In real life, he looked like the Michelin Man after a crash diet, bald with goofy teeth and industrial-strength glasses.

As it happens, I think Mrs Whitehouse failed. She often made a fool of herself by protesting over small things she could have ignored. And I suspect she got carried away by her fame.

Even so, she was a courageous and determined person who saw a great evil being done and – in the proper English tradition – went out to fight it.

Those who despise her are mainly Oxbridge snobs who hate women (she’s not the only victim of that).

They look down on her taste in clothes and wince delicately at her Black Country vowels. Well, that’s their problem.

But the interesting thing is that it fell to her to do a job that educated, tasteful Oxbridge persons shirked. They shirked it because, unlike the people of the suburbs, they didn’t or wouldn’t see that if you make swearing, violence and sexual licence seem normal on the TV, these things will become normal in your society.

Does anyone doubt it? If TV doesn’t affect people’s tastes and impulses, why do businesses spend billions advertising on it, and why do politicians fight for time on it?

But the Corporation, which still seeks to drive the cultural revolution onwards and downwards wherever it may lead, has never forgiven her for trying to get in its way, and probably never will.

Now snakes lose their feet

BBC nature programmes often feature gnarled, or at least mature, rural or nautical types who – instead of using fathoms, feet and inches – gabble unconvincingly about metres.

I have often wondered how this happens, since such people would never normally use metric measures.

The other day Sylvia Sheldon, an expert on adders, actually apologised on air for giving the length of a snake in inches.

I rang her up and asked if she’d been taken aside by some glinting metrosexual and ordered to use foreign measurements. But no, she just felt in general that she ought to.

So do greengrocers and butchers. I think this is the result of the prosecution of Steve Thoburn for selling bananas by the pound.

And I also think it explains why they thought it worth prosecuting him.

* The half-witted policy of giving heroin takers methadone, at our expense, instead of setting them to break rocks, is at last falling out of fashion, and in Scotland it is being abandoned. The scheme, which substitutes one drug for another, is based on the false idea that heroin users are victims and ‘addicts’ (whatever that means) rather than wilful, self-damaging criminals.

And, of course, it doesn’t work. Hardly any of the junkies given methadone ever come off drugs, even after three years. The mystery is that this bird-brained approach has lasted so long, and that taxpayers have put up with it.

* Anthony Blair announces that he wants to spend most of his remaining years ‘ensuring that religion is seen as a force for good’. It’s a noble aim, Mr Blair, and, if you really mean it, here’s my suggestion as to how you can achieve it most easily and effectively. Convert to atheism, today if possible.

28 May 2008 1:04 PM

I know it's bad manners, but I'm going to drag religion into it again. Does anyone really think that our political parties or our useless, nationalised police have anything useful to say about knife crime?

Their minds are fixed on the knives. We must have more searches, more bans, 'tougher' penalties (we all know what happens to those). They refuse to consider that this is a matter of the human heart. You need to be immoral to be able to stab another person. A person properly schooled in right and wrong is safe with any weapon. A person with no idea of good and evil is unsafe with a knitting needle, or the cap from a ballpoint pen. The prisons are full of home-made weapons constructed, with the aid of evil intent, from the most innocent things. Do they seriously propose to ban knives, to force us to eat with plastic cutlery at home? On this dim logic, it can't be long before kitchen shops are forbidden to sell knives without demanding background checks.

The crucial thing is to realise why their minds are closed to this blindingly obvious truth. The old rule, that there are none so blind as those who do not wish to see, applies here.

Because the heart of the 'liberation' imposed on this country by the post-war 'enlightenment' is that we are all free now, to do exactly as we wish, when and where we wish to do it - that is to say, the opposite of the religious impulse which requires us (doesn't just ask nicely, but requires) to love our neighbours as we love ourselves. This rejection of the need to care about your neighbour is the one belief that unites (and will eventually drive into warfare among themselves) the baby boom generation and its successors.

The main 'liberation' they care about, the one that Paris 1968, and the student revolution, and the American campus revolt were all about, is the freedom to do exactly as you like. It is of course dressed up as altruistic, and expressed as the view that other people may do exactly as they like. It is frequently accompanied by well-publicised charitable fund-raising or giving. But that's just a sop. The real purpose is to free me. What they have yet to discover in detail is that this also means not only that the other person is equally free to do exactly as he likes, but that this might turn out to the disadvantage of me, especially if the other person is bigger, stronger, crueller, richer and younger than me.

Drugs? Take them. Sex? Have it now and to hell with the consequences. Abortion's easy now. Manners? Who cares. Patience? What's that? Parents? Ignore them as soon as you can, and especially once you've got to university thanks to their money and effort. Teachers? What do they know? Rules? They're for other people. Religion? It's a wicked fraud designed to keep us down. This belief is itself a moral code, but one which is entirely based on the desires of the person involved - and which is destined to cause growing problems as more and more unfettered egos bump into each other.

Just try asking someone to stop using a mobile phone in a quiet carriage, or to stop riding his bicycle on a footpath clearly marked 'No cycling' in foot-high letters, and experience the torrent of self-righteous rage you release, in which it will be you who is in the wrong. "Haven't you anything better to do?", they demand. (Actually, at that moment, no. The rule of law is vital to civilisation and if I don't stand up for it, who will?) "What business is it of yours?" (Very much my business. In a free society, the law is our property and we are obliged to defend it). This is often followed by a lot of pseudo-psychiatry about how it's a personality failing to be concerned about the rule of law. What is completely absent is any sort of shame or embarrassment at having been caught doing something which a free society has specifically said you should not do, for the benefit of others.

I'm pretty sure that most of these types are enthusiastic supporters of Geldof and Dog-Biscuit style 'caring' events such as 'Live Aid' and the rest, and think themselves wonderful philanthropists.

And that's the educated middle class, very often pearl-adorned or floppy-haired members of the "Okay-Yah" bracket, people who actually quite badly need the protection of the law and who (if they ever thought about it) might even grasp that.

The less advantaged, who have quite reasonably taken their cue from the better-off, better-educated 1968ers, don't even feel the need to explain that anyone who gets in their way is bad. They just swear at them, and if that's not effective enough, or enjoyable enough, they hit them in the face and kick their heads as if they were footballs. As someone who uses public transport and visits his own country, I am constantly watching out for this type, so as to keep at least a quarter of a mile away from them under all circumstances.

These are the people to whom there is nothing shocking or particularly bad about sliding a knife between the ribs of a fellow-creature. They are pretty certain they will not get caught, as they have quite enough cunning to know several important things about modern Britain.

One, they know that authority is generally absent and that , even when it is present, it is afraid of them. Second, they know that it is a bluff. From the first time they successfully defied adult authority, they have discovered that those supposedly in charge - parents, teachers, 'Community Support Officers' or, if they are very persistent and lucky, actual Police officers, have no confidence in themselves. Some are better bluffers than others, but in the end they know that nothing stands behind them. These people are unsure of themselves, unsure that they will be backed up by superiors, certain that the law will not act effectively if it is invoked.

I once watched, with some admiration, a ticket collector on a train confront two ticketless, cheating youths who had first tried to hide from him, then pretended to be asleep, then given him false addresses, then been found out. The collector was of that tough, sharp working-class type that keeps(or kept) most organisations running in this country till quite recently. He was just about old enough to remember when authority meant something, and he radiated it himself. The two fare-dodgers were large and fit, but - as their ruses collapsed one after the another - you could see they were actually afraid of this man. You could also smell it - the sour smell of fear does actually exist ( just as the shadow of death does actually pass over the human face at the moment of departure).

The two dodgers were met at the next station by large 'security' men. What the dodgers hadn't yet realised, for they still had the hangdog look of the defeated, was that these bouncers could not legally lay a finger on them. What they also hadn't yet grasped was that the police couldn't be bothered to turn out for something so 'minor'. I watched to see what would happen. The bouncers escorted the dodgers to the ticket window.The police did not come. It dawned on the dodgers that they could more or less escape, if they didn't push their luck.. They lied that they were entitled to half fares, and their lie was accepted. They then paid for child tickets, not from where they'd actually joined the train but form the much closer station where they'd been detected. they sauntered off, smirking and unpunished, having got a cheap ride when - according to the menacing posters all over the station - they should have got a criminal record. The ticket collector stood by, fuming powerlessly. He told me it happened all the time. I wonder if he still bothers.

Next time, those two would be bolder. By now, I expect they carry knives.

The other striking thing about our uneducated young is how very well-briefed they are about their 'Human Rights' and their rights under the Police and Criminal Evidence Act codes of practice. Which just goes to show that if we could motivate them, we could teach them something useful. But this knowledge, which has no moral content and is wholly practical, merely confirms the view that authority is mush and the law a jest.

What nobody much wonders is why there is no authority. It is ( and I shall return to this shortly) because nobody can agree on what the source of authority is, or what its purpose might be.

In these chaotic circumstances blood feuds and revenge, the paying off of scores, the collection of debts with the threat of violence, become commonplace. And those who have deadly weapons - and are ready to use them - are at an advantage in such a hell. It is all very well carrying a knife for 'protection'. But if you aren't savage enough to strike first with it, you might as well carry a toothpick. One more score to the ferals.

But raise the subject of morality - and of where it comes from - and say that authority should be armed with true penal sanctions, and the 1968 generation will turn on you. You are 'preaching', you are spreading 'moral panic' you have an 'authoritarian personality', you are 'Victorian', etc etc. It has come to the point where, if bishops of the church urge public figures to abide by the rules of the churches they belong to, those bishops are accused of 'putting pressure ' on them, and of 'interfering in politics'. Yet the politicians themselves have in many cases sought votes by openly espousing church membership. One or the other, it seems to me. But not both.

Yes, I did mention Atheism at the beginning. For that is at the root of all this. Once people don't acknowledge any moral authority outside themselves, they can choose which rules to take seriously and which not to entirely according to their own feelings at any time. They will generally do this on the basis of what suits them. It begins with little things, and moves on to the great. We are now at the stage where it is moving on quite fast.

One of the key features of atheism is that atheists themselves are unable to grasp this point. We're just as good as religious people, they respond, if not better. Maybe so. Religious people who understand their creeds know perfectly well that they're no better than anyone else. That's not the issue. What is?.

It is this. What do you really mean by 'good'? Why (for example) is fidelity better than adultery, patience better than impatience? Watch people who are nice to you in the office, as they drive, in a hurry, in frantic traffic, and you may see another side of them. 'Road rage', where we are unrestrained by fears about how we will look to those we live and work with, is an interesting measure of what we are really like. Cars are a powerful moral lie-detector.

And what, apart from your own convenience, impels you to follow this good you allege you support? The luxury atheists of the British and American middle classes live in areas, and work in places, where the Christian rules of right and wrong are still by and large accepted and lauded in public. But they are not really accepted in private. When people think that nobody is watching, they aren't so nice. It is usually easy to be publicly moral in good times and comfortable circumstances. But we all know how, when real conflict arises, people can become savages. Some of the supposedly nicest places to work, such as universities, are seething pits of vengeful, backbiting office politics when promotions or sought-after appointments are concerned.

Now, take away the large houses and gardens, the peaceful streets, the plentiful money and easily-hired servants of the luxury suburbs. And put the same people in the thin-walled, cramped boxes of the sink estates, with their criminal godfathers, their gangs, their burglars and drug dealers, their fatherless children and unpoliced nights. And see how 'good' the luxury atheists would be ( or how good anyone would be). Some of them would go under in a few days, beaten, terrified and cowed as so many are in these places, and with nothing to hope for. Some of them would , I suspect, quickly find that they made quite good louts, with knives, and ready to use them. Why not? What, in their universe, would be wrong with that if it suited them? There's no rational point, really, in being good in circumstances where being good gets you knifed. It's an irrational act -unless you have been taught to recognise the importance of absolute good.

I'm not saying that religious people would necessarily fare any better, though the best of them might, because they would have a genuine reason to resist. The trouble is that when morality has suffered a general; collapse, individual goodness is simply swamped and appears to be quite purposeless and indeed dangerously stupid . Christians could just as easily go under - but they are not responsible for the preaching of popular atheism, which is the thing I'm really protesting against here. And so they are not responsible for - and they are opposed to - the systematic destruction of Christian feeling, which in my view has created these places. That's why it's so urgent to reverse that process, and re-Christianise the country.

I'll be accused here of cynically advocating religion as a means of social control. Actually I'm not. I think there are better reasons for Christianity than the good results it produces in our immediate surroundings. But if anyone does want to use it as a cynical method of social control, they'll find it a lot more effective than metal detectors, police crackdowns or the strong, repressive state we'll soon be living under, if we don't learn how to be good on our own.

24 May 2008 6:40 PM

Let's have no more of this footling about over abortion. The issue isn’t how old a baby has to be before you cannot kill it. It is whether you think it’s right to do away with another human to suit your convenience.

Those who wonder what they would have done if they had lived at the time of some terrible injustice now know the answer. We do live in such a time. And we do nothing.

I had resigned myself to the fact that we are a callous and barbarous society, selfish almost beyond belief and so twisted that we now regard children as a burden. I had thought the most practical way of dealing with this was to try at least to cut the age at which abortions can take place. But I now think that was wrong.

The abortionists are not interested in compromise. Why should they be? They have always known what they were doing. They must know by now that the more abortions you allow, the more you have. They have – for the moment – won the argument that you can kill if it’s convenient. And our whole society has adopted the same self-serving view, often without realising it.

Who cares about 3,000 road deaths a year? Nobody but the victims’ families. The rest of us would fight (to the death?) against the lower speed limits and the tough driving tests that would prevent this.Who cares about the discarded old, stuffed into homes, drugged, bullied, then crammed with morphine to speed their departure?

And these are the attitudes of nice people, responsible, educated, clean in their habits. It’s not surprising that the feral poor have spotted that they live in a country where life is not much valued. So why not end Friday night by kicking someone’s head as if it were a football? It’s not as if anyone will take it seriously.

Life’s not just cheap in modern Britain. It’s on permanent special offer. So let’s have an end to the polite truce about abortion. If it must be legal, then let it at least be despised. Since Parliament’s not going to curb it, let us call it what it is, a massacre conducted to suit the selfish.

Let’s not have any slippery rubbish about its supporters being ‘pro-choice’, when in fact they’re ‘pro-death’. What choice has the poor baby about being dismembered?

Given that none of us knows, or ever will know, just how much pain and misery is spread down the ages by one single stifling of an innocent life, can anyone tell me how an abortion can ever be better than letting the baby be born and adopted?

There are, as we know, plenty of people who would be only too happy to do the adopting.

Truth is washed away on Abbott’s desert isle

Labour MP and Olympic-scale hypocrite Diane Abbott was allowed to star on Desert Island Discs last week, but host Kirsty Young’s introduction failed to mention one of the most notable events in her life – when the MP, right, sent her son to a private school in direct opposition to her own noisy public statements.Why? Was the reference cut? Did Ms Abbott threaten to walk out if it wasn’t? The BBC doesn’t deny it. Nor, despite some bluster, does Ms Abbott. If I were the BBC, I’d let her walk out and hold the door open.

She admits her hypocrisy over schools is ‘indefensible’. Well, in that case, she must either shove her son into one of the sink schools she urges on others or resign as an MP. There’s no honourable middle course.

Yet politicians of all parties now engage in this despicable form of doublethink, and nothing ever happens to them.

Welcome to the ‘saintly heaven’ of South Africa

The scenes of grisly murder in Johannesburg are significant as well as gruesome.

In the tangled, knotted mess of crossed wires and closed circuits that makes up a left-liberal’s mind, South Africa has a special place. When apartheid still existed, it was hell on earth. Now that apartheid has gone, it is a kind of heaven.

How can it be that this paradise has an immigrant problem? Surely everyone is welcome, as these people say everyone should be here?

How can the saintly South Africans be so spectacularly less tolerant of mass immigration than the long-suffering British working class which left-liberals despise? How can that nice Thabo Mbeki preside over a state that deports illegal migrants with ruthless ferocity?

I’ll leave them to try to answer that. The trouble is, if they dare actually to think about it, their poor overloaded brains will probably catch fire.

Vote Cameron...for Blair without the laughs

Yeah, yeah, the Tories are on the road to power, Samantha Cameron’s measuring the Downing Street curtains etc.

I have to admit that I never believed that our mighty media classes – who made Anthony Blair a star and have now made Gordon Brown an anti-star – could galvanise the Tory corpse to this extent. Mind you, I should warn you that by-elections are not a guide to General Elections, and that the Tory ‘surge’ remains far smaller than claimed – a fact easily established if you look, as I have, at the details of the local polls.

And then, what about this? All the people now lauding the Tories used to be in the Blair choir. What changed? Them or the Tories? And, if the Tories do succeed, what’s good about that? A Cameron victory would destroy for ever the remaining proper conservatives in his party – because he would claim his ultra-liberal policies had won the Election.

And how liberal they all are. Did anyone notice that the anti-fatherhood abortion enthusiast George Osborne actually attacked Labour for trying to get the anti-immigrant vote? His objection didn’t seem to be that this was dishonest, as no pro-EU party can do anything about immigration. He thought raising the subject at all was ‘nasty’. Left-wing liberals think that and he’s one of them.

You read it first here. Vote for the Cameroons and you’ll get what you deserve, another ten years of Blairism – without the laughs.

***************************Cue for more enraged letters from a policeman’s angry mum, or that’s what she says she is. But isn’t it interesting how the Police Federation can offer a bold, even rather rude challenge to the Home Secretary about pay, but has never, to my knowledge, uttered a cheep or twitter of protest about the political correctness imposed upon its members? If the police ‘service’ really is full of people who secretly want to do the job properly and don’t like the diversity seminars and the Human Wrongs Act, why have they never done anything about it?

I will tell you. They care more about pay. In which case, they – and their angry mums – will just have to accept it when I call the police a useless nationalised industry.

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21 May 2008 4:08 PM

I'm travelling again and will save any thoughts on the Human Fertilisation Bill till later. Reader should already know of my doubts about the current frenzy of pro-Tory polls and media stories.

But, as we wait for the result of the Crewe and Nantwich by-election, I thought I'd set down a few notes on these strange occasions. Long ago it was my job to write about by-elections. Two stick in my memory, because they - sort of - changed history. We used to have many more in those days - the mid-1980s - because MPs in general were older and had often come into Parliament after doing real jobs. So they died in office more often.

They were also, in that time of Thatcherite triumph which followed the Royal Navy's recapture of the Falklands, rare opportunities for political protest. They were also completely misleading because they got so much coverage that people stopped behaving normally. Something similar has just happened in the London mayoral election. I'll come back to it. The Tories would almost always be flattened, usually by the Liberals or the SDP. The Tories would then go on to win the next general election with a crushing majority.

Most political reporters and commentators in those days were used to this because there were so many such elections. And even if they weren't used to it, there was enough evidence around to rub in the point. But alas, not now. There have been so few important by-elections in the New Labour era that people inside and outside politics have forgotten all about them.

I suppose I'd better not identify the Labour shadow cabinet member who once confessed to me and a couple of others that he and almost all his colleagues had been hoping like mad for their party to lose the Darlington by-election back in 1983. The plan was that, devastated by the defeat, they would then go in a body to poor old Michael Foot, the party's endearing but hopeless leader, and tell him that in all conscience it was now his duty to step down.The idea was then to stampede the party into electing Denis Healey instead, so transforming Labour's hopes in the coming general election.

"And then" snarled the Shadow minister "our candidate went and won the bleeping by-election, and saved Michael Foot for the nation." Even funnier, in a way, Labour then lost the seat a few weeks later in the General Election.

I wonder if similar thoughts are circulating in the Cabinet, though of course it's far harder to unseat a Prime Minister, who has kissed hands with the Queen, than it is to get rid of a mere Opposition Leader who has none of the powers which office provides.

What happened, as I recall, was this. The SDP fielded a highly telegenic candidate in the shape of a popular local TV presenter. It seemed, from the start, as if this man was destined to ride the wave of mild anti-Thatcher disquiet that was then abroad. But - because it was a key by-election - he came under too much scrutiny, and made a public fool of himself in a televised debate which would never have happened in a normal contest.

People in a mainly Labour seat like Darlington weren't ready to vote Tory, so they switched back to the Labour man, who was commendably bland and safe, and might easily have been an SDP candidate himself. Kaboom. What did it mean for the 1983 general election? Nothing. Would it have happened without the harsh light of coverage? No. Did it have an effect? yes, but not the one intended by anybody, or discussed at the time by the commentators, none of them ( so far as I recall) got a hint of the plot t get rid of Michael Foot.

The other memorable contest was at Bermondsey where the old monster of the London Labour machine, Bob Mellish had stepped down and was determined to sabotage Peter Tatchell, the engaging and naive young Australian chosen to replace him by a party that had ( like most urban Labour Parties) been taken over by dedicated far leftists as the old trade unionists had weakened or disappeared.

Amazing as it may now seem, Peter Tatchell was not in those days openly homosexual. He (quite reasonably) dodged questions on the subject which people asked him when they had no business to do so. He stuck to the main plank of his campaign which was an excellent one for Bermondsey "Houses with Gardens". I suspect the sheer nastiness of the experience changed Mr Tatchell's life. Looking back, I think his quiet dignity and guts under an unending hosing of innuendo are one of the most moving political performances I've ever seen. And Parliament is the poorer for his never having got there. He is a principled defender of freedom of speech, amongst other laudable things. I've publicly apologised to him for any part I may have played in the campaign against him, in anything I wrote at the time. Those of us who were there now mostly realise that the man we portrayed as the villain was in fact the hero of the occasion.

It was quite clear from early on that the anti-Tatchell campaign had worked, and that he was unlikely to win. Mellish himself had sponsored an alternative candidate(the first time the expression 'Real Labour' was used, I think) , and made one or two ugly appearances. Things were further complicated by the fact that two of the other candidates were called Hughes.It may have been three. Quite how the disaffected Labour vote concentrated itself behind the Liberal Simon Hughes I have no idea. But somehow it did. And in the way of Liberals (whose professionalism at detailed street politics is unmatched) he has held it ever since.

What did it mean? In terms of national politics, nothing. Some might say that Peter Tatchell's defeat contributed to the creation of New Labour. If so, it's hard to see exactly how. Alas, the one Labour Party policy of those days which has genuinely been abandoned ( instead of being dressed up or obscured or approached crabwise to avoid being spotted) is the only one that was any good, namely withdrawal from the European Monster. And Labour ( and the Tories) are now wholly committed to a sexual radicalism unthinkable when Peter Tatchell stood for parliament.

This, I think, help to show that politics is often not what it seems to be, and also that the main direction of British politics in the last 25 years has been to adopt and pursue policies that politicians knew were unpopular, but somehow managed to persist with anyway.

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18 May 2008 1:24 AM

From tender flower to noisy hoyden, Cherie Blair has come a long, long way.

How extraordinary to find that this person, whose privacy was so sacrosanct that it was considered sinful to ask her questions, is now sharing details of her contraceptive arrangements with anyone who wishes to know them, and many who don't.

I once had New Labour's attack dogs set on me for daring to enquire into the time she stood for Parliament.

I thought I'd never be forgiven for once asking, as she swept by me in a Brighton hotel, if she claimed child benefit.

And she even tried to sue me for suggesting that she was dodging the comprehensive school system that her husband imposed on others.

Someone who thinks she can stand for Parliament in private – and who is so ultra-sensitive when criticised – should surely steer clear of writing embarrassing memoirs for money and using them to do down so many people.

Even so, we should be grateful for some of what she reveals.

I have long believed that Mr Blair took up politics mainly because he wasn't doing well as a lawyer, and was hired by a desperate Labour Party, purely because he was the living opposite of poor old Michael Foot.

Well, now we're halfway to having the proof. Cherie recalls that he turned up, whimpering with sodden self-pity, 90 minutes late for his own 30th birthday dinner (Cherie had spent the whole day cooking it).

He had been boozing late in a Fleet Street wine bar. "He had stayed drinking, he said, because he was really depressed. 'The thing is,' he said, 'I don't really want to be a barrister any more. I just want to be an MP. And look at me. A General Election looming and no seat.'"

Alas for all of us, a weird Labour Mafia of lawyers and trade union machine men went and found him one.

Then there's the MMR issue. The book opens with an unusual disclaimer that "My memory is not infallible", presumably in case any of it is challenged.

So I think we are entitled to ask if her memory is "infallible" about her statement insisting that her son Leo was given the MMR jab – an assurance that could not be dragged from her by any means when it mattered.

I'll accept this claim only when it's independently confirmed. Remember that her husband's government was engaged in a scheme to bully worried parents into giving their children this injection.

Now, I have reason to believe (I cannot say exactly what it is) that Mrs Blair had good cause to sympathise with those parents who were – reasonably – apprehensive about the jab.

So I still think it is justifiable to ask why she would not say so at the time, and if her memories are accurate now.

Given the totalitarian plan to refuse to let children start school unless they have had the MMR, we really need to know.

The repellent singer Amy Winehouse is the latest famous person to be acquitted without trial after claims of drug abuse.

I think this is quite wrong. It is bad for us all that these charges have not been aired in a proper court under the rules of evidence.

Miss Winehouse should have the right to speak in her own defence and to confront the witnesses against her.

The Crown Prosecution Service was not set up to conduct secret bureaucratic trials.

People will not willingly accept its verdicts if they don't know how they were reached. One of the purposes of a justice system is to give people the chance to dismiss, once and for all, persistent but unproven allegations against them.

What part did this woman's fame play in the decision to arrest her? And in the decision to drop the case?

I have no doubt that prominent people's actions influence their impressionable fans.

If a major rock star was found to be taking illegal drugs, he or she should face exemplary punishment.

At last I have fathomed the reason for the strange new frenzy against Gordon Brown, a frenzy which ought to have been aimed at Anthony Blair many years ago, but never was.

All the suckers who were taken in by Mr Blair are angry at themselves for being fooled and are taking out their rage on Mr Brown.

By doing so, they reveal that the only thing they care about is image and packaging.

The two men are politically identical enemies of Britain, liberty and property. There's only one way to tell them apart – one of them can't smile, and the other one can't read.

This pathetic willingness to be fooled by public relations is also the reason why the same people who snarl and spit at Mr Brown have been conned by the New Blair, David Cameron.

So, watch out George Osborne. When David Cameron has messed up the country for ten long years and then heads off into a comfy retirement, just before everyone realises how completely they have been diddled yet again, it will be you who will get the backlash.

Defenders of David Cameron and his Unconservative Party claim he is "only doing his best for his daughter" by wangling her into a heavily oversubscribed Anglican state primary school.

Not so. Mr Cameron is very wealthy and could easily have bought Nancy into a better private school.

He would also have avoided elbowing his way to a rare good state school place that could have gone to a child from a poor home.

Mr Cameron was doing the best for himself, and the most interesting thing is that, like Labour politicians, Tory politicians now have to pretend to use the state school system, while being careful the state schools they choose are totally unlike the ones you have to use.

The Unconservative Party becomes more like its supposed rival every day.

Once again, a shooting incident is linked with anti-depressants. This time it is the barrister Mark Saunders, who was taking these dubious pills for months before he decided to have his Chelsea gun battle with the police.

Look at almost every such incident, anywhere in the world, from Columbine High School to Finland, and there they'll be. When will governments begin to take this seriously, instead of wittering about unattainable 'gun control'?

Unable to leave anything alone, pestilential reformers now plan to get rid of traditional English judicial robes and wigs, replacing them with designer gowns which will make our judges look like gay bishops in some dubious American sect.

Well, maybe that's what they ought to look like, given how feeble they are. Perhaps we can bring back the proper Judge Jeffreys outfit when we eventually sicken of softness and go back to punishment.

14 May 2008 3:53 PM

Back from Moscow on Sunday night, I thought it was time to deal with some of the points made on this weblog while I've been away. I'll take them more or less in order. "John Demetriou" responded to the post on 'The Lion has wings' (9th May, 1.03 am) . He readily assented to the undoubted fact that "the BBC doesn't like right-wing Tories". I should think so. But he didn't grasp the huge significance of this, and therefore didn't understand why it is so disturbing, and why so many even more disturbing things follow from it.

The BBC is supposedly bound by its Royal Charter to be politically impartial. The point of this rule was not to make the BBC the arbiter of what is thinkable, but to ensure that it didn't use its immense power to influence politics. Yet it does, and on the side of a 'centre-left' view of right and wrong that is deeply partial. The phrase 'right-wing Tories' is itself a giveaway - the words 'right-wing' are employed to mean 'unacceptable'. They have no absolute meaning apart from that, since a Tory who might have been considered acceptable by the BBC in the 1960s or the 1970s would be dismissed (for his social, moral and cultural views) as a sort of Nazi by the BBC of today.

For the BBC's 'progressivism' ( I'll return to the word 'progressive' later) is a ratchet, just like the Left's position in general. The official Tory opposition is allowed to exist provides it accepts, in general, the changes made by the Left, and proposes only minor modifications in office. In this way it can function as a safety valve, allowing breathing spaces when state control and taxation do not increase at the previous rate, for a few years. Then we return to the proper, BBC-approved style of government in which the march towards the 'progressive' utopia proceeds again. Note that in an article for the 'Independent', which he no doubt hopes his loyalists won't see, David Cameron last Friday declared that the Unconservative Party are now the 'true progressives' of British politics.

It is outrageous that an organisation kept in being by a poll tax, enforced with the threat of imprisonment, is allowed to enforce its political prejudice in this way. But Mr "Demetriou" passes by this huge feature of our political landscape as if it were unimportant, or as if he approved of it.

With even more than his usual bumptiousness, he asks :"Why do you think the reforms of the 60s happened? A lot of people voted for Harold Wilson...knowing full well what that implied politically. So either the lion's share of the electorate were brain washed, or, the zeitgeist and political momentum and will of the people was a bit more lefty than we know it now or knew it before hand."

This is not actually the case. You do not need to have been there ( I was, though only 12) to know this. You can read the documents, and (for instance) Dominic Sandbrook's excellent book on the era, 'White Heat' . Political insiders, who had read Crosland's 'Future of Socialism' and "Roy Jenkins's 'The Labour Case', published some years before, knew that electing a Labour government would mean a vast social and educational revolution. But the voters didn't. The revolution wasn't in the 1964 Labour manifesto - which, for instance, claimed that comprehensive education would mean 'grammar schools for all', a claim that its author must have known was a lie. The Plowden Report, basis for the general sabotage of state primary schools, wasn't even published till 1967.

Many voted Labour because of revulsion over the moral decay of the dying establishment, exposed in the Profumo affair. It is hard to think that voters disgusted by ministerial adultery would have actively voted for no-fault divorce, which they then got. Nor would they have voted for the abolition of hanging, if they had been told that this is what they would get. Personally I doubt if they would have voted for abortion on demand either, but they got that too.

Many just thought it was 'time for a change' and were impressed by Harold Wilson's air of scientific knowledge, competence and modernity. The willingness of people to be taken in, in this way is limitless. The great raft of cultural and moral change, as described in my 'Abolition of Britain' (which I am glad to say is shortly to be re-published in Britain) were not in the 1964 or 1966 manifestos. They were largely brought about by so-called 'Private members' Bills' in all cases covertly supported by the government whips, and with the collusion of large numbers of left-wing Tory MPs. The Labour Right (then still in existence) often voted against them. Brian Lapping's 'The Labour Government, 1964-1970', Penguin Special, 1970, shows in detail just how radical the Wilson government was. I really don't think anyone in the 1964 and 1966 elections ( in the second of which I went out canvassing for Labour) had a clue what they would get.

The concept of an 'Establishment' is by its nature hard to define or pin down. Even so, such a thing clearly exists and clearly affects life in this country, at least as much as economics and foreign policy do. I am not an academic researcher, but I am sure that, were anyone to research this, the penetration of key positions in education, law and justice, the civil service, the church and the media by the radical left could easily be traced and established. Anyone who deals with any of these spheres could not fail to have noticed it. Anyone who can remember the state of these bodies and institutions 40 years ago would realise that they had undergone a major change. Those of us who watched and listened to the BBC during the early 60s, the years of Hugh Carleton Greene, realised that a deep change was under way. The protests and warnings of Mary Whitehouse, largely borne out by what has happened since, were at the very least an indication that this was important.

Anyone who doubts the potent role of the media in deciding what is 'news' , and how much importance is given to a subject, needs only to look at the concentrated fury visited on Gordon Brown in the last few months ( by the very media who gave the politically identical Anthony Blair a free pass for almost ten years) to realise that . I noticed the other day that the establishment bellwether, 'the Guardian' had begun publishing cartoons of Gordon Brown as a decomposing corpse, just as it did with John Major. Mr Cameron is portrayed as a perky maggot. What Mr 'Demetriou' declines to think about is the curious reasoning that leads a left-wing establishment to turn on the leader of the principal party of the left, and to begin to puff the leader of the supposed principal party of the right.

If such critics would start to think, rather than pretending that nothing interesting was going on, they might not necessarily reach the same conclusions that I have reached. But it would be a good deal more interesting to read what they have to say than it is at the moment.

I think the difficulty with columnists is that both their keen supporters and their bitter enemies often see what they want to see in their columns, rather than what is actually there. That is because, as I have said before, most political opinions are tribal chants, or fashion choices, which their owner has not thought about for years (if at all) and doesn't much want to.

"Herbert Asquith" complains that I attack the concept of 'addiction' without medical qualifications. The whole point about 'addiction', Mr 'Asquith', is that it has no objective medical definition and is often attributed to people by 'experts' who also lack medical qualifications. As for the word 'moron', I don't believe it has been used in a technical, medical sense for many decades. I'm pretty unenthusiastic about psychiatry, much of which seems to me to be speculative pseudo-science gussied-up with Greek expressions, but the use of terms such as 'paranoia' is really just a dressed-up way of saying 'this man is mad and we don't need to listen to him'.

The trouble is that, in the old USSR, such diagnoses were used against dissenters from the regime's view, and they were confined to asylums and 'treated' with powerful drugs and violent restraints, and I see a strong parallel between that and the way in which conventional political correctness tries to classify its opponents as suffering from phobias and pathologies - so it doesn't need to reason with them. I feel particularly strongly about this because I once met Anatoly Koryagin, a Soviet psychiatrist who courageously protested against this misuse of his profession, and was himself classified as insane as a punishment for his temerity. By the time they had finished with him, his own wife couldn't recognise him. Fortunately , thanks to protests from his western colleagues, he was eventually released and restored to health.

"Paul T" justly reminds me that I said that if Boris Johnson won the London mayoralty I might need to reconsider my position on the inevitability of a Tory defeat. If this had been the only result of the May elections, I might have devoted more attention to it, and to the reasons why in the end I decided that my basic position remains sound, though I am certainly troubled by the ability of a determined media establishment to boost David Cameron - if only by creating a force-field of negative charisma round Gordon Brown

I was so appalled by the way in which my media colleagues misrepresented (or failed to examine) the English and Welsh local elections that I felt I needed to concentrate mainly on that. As I've already pointed out, not one of my critics on this subject has challenged my factual point, that 44% of 35% is not a basis for a general election landslide. I assume that is because they know I'm right. In which case, why does conventional wisdom continue to insist that the political climate has changed utterly? I'll be analysing some recent opinion polls in the near future, but brief glances at the data show there is a still an incredibly high level of abstention.

This wasn't quite the case in the London mayoral election. In fact, it's interesting that Ken Livingstone won in 2004 with far fewer votes than he lost with in 2008 ( if you add 1st and 2nd preferences together, he got 828,380 in 2004 and 1,028,996 in 2008). The fact that London was a higher poll results from several things:

The amazing amount of coverage devoted to a purely local election in national media, much of it with an axe to grind; the fact that London is actually now an EU province, the only equivalent in England of the EU provinces in Scotland,Wales and Northern Ireland.; the fact that this province has an elected head of state, the only one that does in what is still officially a monarchy. I'd add the fact that Ken Livingstone is a brand on his own, who exists independently from the Labour Party, has little connection with Gordon Brown. There's also the very significant fact that many media figures on the left, notably Andrew Gilligan, Nick Cohen and Martin Bright, joined the anti-Livingstone campaign, knowing perfectly well that this would help Boris Johnson. Would they have done this if David Cameron hadn't liberalised the Tories? You must be joking. But I think a lot of left-liberal voters saw this as permission to defect from Ken, either to abstention, to Brian Paddick (the Liberal) or even to Boris Johnson.

Then there's the 'Have I got news for You' factor. I once appeared on this ghastly programme (yes, they were desperate, desperate to get somebody 'right wing' on it so as to try to look balanced). Even that one appearance (they cut out one of my two perfectly decent unscripted jokes) gave me a taste of what real TV celebrity might be like. I was more or less used to a small number of politically interested people recognising me from programmes such as 'Question Time'. But after being on 'Have I..." just once, I found the number of complete strangers who recognised me shot up, and went well beyond the borders of the politically interested. This was showbusiness. And Boris Johnson has been on it not just once, but (I think) dozens of times. He is, as I pointed out, a major brand in British public life, and his humour, likeability and self-depreciation are hugely attractive to people who do not share his politics, and who suspect (in my view rightly) that Boris Johnson's personality is more important than his politics, which are rather vague.

So I don't think I'm persuaded that a Johnson victory in London (itself a completely untypical part of the country) is proof that the Tories will or can win the next election. It would be a loss of nerve, given the real results in the local elections and given these specific factors, to abandon a long-held judgement (this *judgement* is entirely separate from my *opinion* , that the Unconservatives *shouldn't* win. That opinion won't change even if I'm the last person alive that holds it). But I will admit that I had underestimated the concerted will of the left-liberal media elite to get David Cameron into Downing Street, and also underestimated the ability of Gordon Brown to dig himself deeper into the deep mineshaft he is in.

People who worry about the 'feasibility ' of my scheme still don't get the point that there is no other course if you want a pro-British government. A Tory party recovery now would mean the end, for years and perhaps for good, of any hopes of a morally, socially, culturally or fiscally conservative government in this country, not least because of the death-blow it would deal to the remaining conservatives in the Unconservative Party. By the way 'David' , who claims that the election of David Cameron was fair, has missed the entire point of my post. David Cameron's election as Tory leader was the result of a cleverly-orchestrated media-stampede, based on one vapid speech. Without the intervention of the liberal media, Mr Cameron would probably not even have come third, and David Davis would almost certainly have won.

I do not advocate this course, of trying to undermine the Tory Party, because it is certain to succeed (nothing worth having is ever that easy). I do so because there is no other way of achieving what needs to be achieved. What almost makes me weep is the way that the very people who could bring this aim about constantly seek petty, silly excuses for voting for their bitterest and most determined enemy. What possible advantage do they see for themselves in a Cameron government committed to the EU, a huge welfare state, a social-work approach to crime, comprehensive state education, the continued undermining of marriage, and all the rest of the rubbish we have already?.

I am so grateful for those contributors who do grasp these points and take the argument seriously. I am also grateful for those who say that they like Mr Cameron because he is left-wing. But those who claim to be conservative, and argue for voting for Mr Cameron, just reduce me to bafflement.As for those who say ' let's not do anything new unless we're certain it will succeed, even though doing nothing is pretty terrible', do they apply this feeble view to everything else in life? I do hope not.

On the subject of cannabis(and I return to this again later), let me first of all quote from a letter published in Monday's 'Times':

"I support the Government’s intention to raise cannabis to category B. As a hospital manager for over ten years and operating under the Mental Health Act (1983), I see almost weekly people sectioned because of mental illness and who either need their section renewed or are appealing against detention. Rarely do I see a teenager or young man who has not taken or who is not taking cannabis. Those rare occasions where cannabis is not used the committee remark upon it. For those vulnerable youngsters the results are tragic. Bright futures are destroyed and the prospects for them are a life of using the mental health services during recurring episodes of their illness. Employment at best is poor or often non-existent.

I agree with the advisory council that a full educational programme showing the possible effects of smoking cannabis should be undertaken. In my opinion heroin addiction is preferable to cannabis in that heroin treatment can be successful, but once cannabis has triggered a mental illness there is no cure on offer.

The Rev Dr Anthony J. Carr "

I would add that if there is as yet not much research linking cannabis with mental illness, it is because that research has yet to be commissioned, and should be commissioned. People seem to think that research mysteriously happens independently of fashion and funding. But until recently, the powerful international PR campaign for cannabis has pushed its critics into a corner. If the research is done, I am confident it will dispel all doubts on the matter.

"Rob" , in my view feebly, tries to suggest that my campaign for legal controls on a dangerous poison are in some way similar to political correctness's campaigns to suppress beliefs it does not like. I would like to think that this was such obvious twaddle that it wouldn't be necessary to say so, but "Rob" is obviously rather proud of this formula. So I will say "This is obvious twaddle".

In another non-parallel, "Will" urges me to substitute obesity fro drugs in my argument about cannabis. Why should I? What are you talking about? Nobody ever lost his mind through getting too fat. And if you get fat, you can get thin again - whereas if you lose your mind to dope, you never get it back. Nor is food, or fatness, illegal, by international treaty or national statute.

Patrick Elliott says that in my item about the police shooting of Mark Saunders, I seem to be suggesting that they were reasonably defending themselves. Actually I'm more cautious than that. Mr Elliott has read into my words something I was careful not to say. Not having been there myself, I am reluctant to be too specific about whether I think the police acted justifiably on this occasion. It is perfectly clear that Mr Saunders was behaving in a dangerous and criminal fashion, but nobody who wasn't there can have much of an opinion on how else it might have been handled.

I say I " have little doubt that the police shooting of Mark Saunders in London will be found to have been lawful by an independent inquiry. " I then add:"People who start gun battles with the police in Chelsea are asking for quite a lot of trouble. ". These are, once again, statements of fact, not of opinion.

I am against the arming of the police. I feel a sort of rage whenever I see an armed policeman in this country, because I know that we once managed without them and can remember when as a people we were proud of it, and feel a keen, almost painful sense of loss. But I think an armed police force was the inevitable result of getting rid of hanging, as I have often said. The real threat of the rope kept British criminals unarmed. The main point of my article was that hanging would be more civilised. The other point was that, if the police are to be given latitude when they shoot people who are acting in a frightening manner, and they obviously have to be or their job is impossible, then the law-abiding public should be given the same .

What I didn't know when I wrote the item (because I was in Moscow) was that Mr Saunders had been taking anti-depressants. The number of shooting incidents in which these drugs are involved, in the USA, in Finland and now in Britain, is disturbing and needs to be examined urgently. Research, please. It is in many ways the most interesting thing about the event.

I hope this answers one of the queries of Mike Williamson. But Mr Williamson also says "In a recent blog you said the only people who supported a ban on guns were the criminals and I would also say that is true of a ban on drugs. I think Prohibition in the US was the major cause of organised crime and the corruption of the police and judiciary. Like it or not, cannabis is now so widely used that it just won't be possible to get rid of it."

This is another wholly useless parallel. Guns are a wholly different thing from drugs. There are many good uses for guns in good hands, mainly as deterrents of evil actions. There is no good use for a stupefying, brain-destroying narcotic like cannabis (despite the medical marijuana propaganda which was long ago admitted to be a red herring by Keith Stroup, one of the leading figures in the pro-dope campaign NORML. And even if you are gullible enough to believe in medical cannabis, I think you'll accept that no truly medicinal drug could possibly be taken without measured doses, and could certainly not be smoked or baked in a cake. There is in fact a legal form of THC, in the form of Nabilone, a nausea-suppressant legally available on hospital prescription in Britain. But it is not very widely used, and the pro-dope campaigners don't like it because you can't get high on it, and so pretend it doesn't exist) .

Prohibition ( here we go again, does nobody listen?) was an attempt to ban something already deep in the culture of most Americans. In fact it was seen by beer-drinking Italian-Americans, whiskey drinking Irish -Americans and beer-drinking German-Americans as an attempt by Puritan WASPS to attack their pleasures, and by implication to attack them. That's one of the reasons Franklin Roosevelt abolished it, though it did a surprising amount of good in some ways. I might add that it did not make illegal the possession of alcohol ( and it is the legal attitude to possession that this classification row affects), but only the manufacture, sale and transport of it. I am , as I repeatedly say, uninterested in the sale of drugs, and the supposedly evil dealers. I don't think there would be any dealers to speak of if people were afraid of being caught in possession.

Anyway, the number of regular dope-users ( they all seem to think that everybody is as stupid as they are, and so exaggerate their numbers and support) is way below the number of habitual alcohol users in pre-prohibition America. It's also way below the number of people who, in my childhood, thought it safe and right to drink and drive - and who were persuaded otherwise by a mixture of stern prosecution, repeatedly applied (everyone knew someone who'd been caught when this began) and unremitting propaganda.

Why be so defeatist? Of course, Mr Williamson is not one of these. But defeatists usually desire the defeat of the thing they say will be beaten, and say 'it won't work' because they don't want it to work. It's the same, I think, with getting people to get rid of the Unconservative Party. They moan and grizzle about how hard it is, because they don't really want it to happen.

Adrian Ford says the legal status of cannabis has little effect on its use. That's because the legal status on its own is not the determining factor. What matters is if the police arrest and charge, the authorities prosecute and the judges send to jail. Cannabis users stupidly criminalise themselves when they knowingly break the law and buy this muck. They shouldn't blame others for criminalising them. Nobody made them buy it. A caution for a first offence, and then six months breaking rocks in the Hebrides for a second offence, with a full year for a third, should do the trick. You have to mean it, though. I do.

In contrast to those who claim that my article supported the police action against Mark Saunders, Dave Philpot appears to accuse me of being too hard on the police. Make your minds up, do. Once again, proof that people see what they wish to see, and often don't actually read what is said. I'm still waiting for my pro-Tory critics to come back to me on the facts of the local elections.

Now to the subject of Israel, where people fly off their handles almost the moment they start arguing about it. David Corbett writes:"Much of what is now the United States was purchased fairly and legally by Puritans, Quakers , Baptists, et . al. during the colonial period. Some Eastern tribes were ordered to cede lands to the whites or suffer extermination from the Iroquois ( Delawares for example). Later when the United States was a nation. The Indian nations were not citizens of the republic ( hostile aliens ) , and were often allied against it with charming European British,French, and Spanish interests. When the United States emerged victorious against these threats, the Europeans and Indians were forced to cede lands as reparations. C'est la guerre. I am not excusing land grabs or illegal treaties but not all of the U.S. was "stolen ", and certainly not by Americans."

Ummm. Where to start? Israelis would point out that much of their land was purchased legally. I won't go into the ins and outs of that, as it's not my position that Israel is blameless (as some posters seem to think, or rather, to want to believe so as to make it easier for them). Israel has often behaved very badly indeed, and the Deir Yassin massacre, mentioned by some contributors, is a specially serious example of that. I've always condemned such behaviour outright, along with the actions of the Stern Gang, and think it shame on Israel for commemorating some of these terrorists, and elevating others to high office in politics.

But my point is that Israel shouldn't be judged any more harshly (or any less harshly) for its faults than other countries, and that every major colonial nation has seized land from others and forced people into exile. I am unclear why it matters that the Indian nations weren't citizens of the American republic (were they offered the choice?). Nor do I see how being 'forced to cede land as reparations' is not another self-justifying way of saying "we took it". The Israeli argument would also be 'C'est la guerre'. Just admit it, that's all. I love the USA, but it's futile to pretend that it treated the Indians (or, if you prefer, Native Americans) fairly, or that it didn't seize huge parts of its most valuable territory from Mexico.

I do not want to get into the general argument about two states, Camp David, etc etc etc. We would never have an end to it. Both sides have long, detailed and excellent cases, which is why a firm and final compromise is the only end that would work, but there'll be no compromise until the Arab side stop believing that West will always give in under pressure. And that will only happen when Arab propaganda against Israel, especially in Europe, is countered, and gullible people, especially in Europe, stop believing that there's only one good side, and only one bad side.

My only point here, the only one I've time and space to argue to any effect, because it has natural justice on its side, is that Israel should be judged no less, and no more harshly than other nations. At present, it isn't . And those who judge it specially harshly need to ask themselves why they do this.

Ulrich Martin Renner says the Germans expelled from Poland and the Czech lands were 'actually expelled from Germany. No, Herr Renner, they were expelled from territories lost to Germany as a result of its defeat in an aggressive war it had itself started, under a government with much popular support. To pretend that these territories are still Germany is as futile and dangerous as is the Palestinian demand for a 'right of return'. Herr Renner is however quite right that this was brutal ethnic cleansing, in defiance of promises given at Potsdam that it would be conducted in a humane fashion.

AS I wrote in the Mail on Sunday on 5th October 2003 "We said in Article 12 of the 1945 Potsdam Agreement that those Germans displaced would be moved in 'an orderly and humane manner'.

In truth, we did little or nothing to keep our word. The expulsion was chaotic, bloody and cruel. Many died, including innocent children whom nobody can accuse of anything.

And the expellee organisations of today are not crypto-Nazi oafs trying to rewrite the past. When I asked Walter Stratmann, their spokesman, about the controversy, his replies were measured and thoughtful.

Stratmann, 55, rejected any attempt to make out that the expulsion was equal to the Holocaust. He said: 'The Holocaust belongs in a historical constellation on its own. It was without comparison. It is a different theme, one that stands alone. I don't think President Rau drew this comparison between the expelled and the Jews, and neither do we.' He rejected Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer's view that the events were part of a German self-destruction, saying: 'What Fischer said is not true. The expellees had no control over their fate. They were civilians, children, women, not soldiers. They were [his emphasis] victims.' And he was quite clear that this was not about a return to the lost lands.

'There can be no return. This is not what this is about. It is about perhaps going back to visit, but we are about remembering. It has nothing to do with compensation, that is not what we seek.' He rejected the idea that the episode should now be forgotten, as it largely has been in Britain, saying: 'One must always remember the past. It is important for the future that such things must never happen again and that can only come through remembering. To forget is totally the wrong way.' One other surprising voice urged Britain to acknowledge that a wrong was done. Alan Posner is a senior editor and columnist for the influential daily Die Welt newspaper. Posner told me: 'It's disgraceful that Germany should not be allowed to have its own centre to commemorate the victims of that huge expulsion. It is a blot on Britain's escutcheon and on the memory of Winston Churchill that can never be erased.' Before you jump to conclusions, you should know that Herr Posner was born in Britain in 1949, son of a British mother and a German Jewish refugee from Hitler who served in the British Army in the Second World War. He is one of the few Germans who has an absolute right to speak in this way. And his plea for a mature attitude to modern Germany is hard to resist. "

It's a fascinating and disturbing episode of modern history that very few British people even know about. If they did, they might be less self-righteous about Israel.

"Grant" accuses me of hypocrisy, and alleges that I say "The Jews should be applauded for taking back lands from which they were exiled over two thousand years ago!". I say nothing of the kind. The whole regrettable business is the regrettable consequence of European Judophobia, and is the least worst solution to a shameful problem. What's more I often criticise Israel, as any thinking person must and as many Israelis do. I have particularly attacked the use of indiscriminate bombing and shelling that inevitably leads to the deaths of children. 'Grant' presumably hasn't noticed this because it doesn't suit his argument, whatever that may be.

He also says " It's odd that Peter, a committed Christian - or so he says - always ignores the fact that in 1948 20% of the Palestinians were Christian. These Christians have been treated just as badly as the Muslims, but their existence is a very inconvenient truth." Inconvenient to whom? It's my strong belief , and I dealt with it to some extent in a recent review of Matt Rees's excellent thriller 'The Bethlehem Murders' (buy it!) that Arab Christians have suffered greatly since the Palestinian Authority took over Christian areas such as Bethlehem. Rees's book has some pretty harrowing descriptions of how things are now. Christian Arabs did a lot better under Israeli rule than they do under PA rule (let alone under the rule of Hamas) . In fact the rise of militant Islam throughout the Middle East has caused a great exodus of Arab Christians from Arab countries.

Nick Seward also ignores my actual point and relies on the belief, unfounded, that defenders of Israel believe it to be a perfect or faultless state that does no wrong. On the contrary, I regard Ariel Sharon as a war criminal. But I still defend Israel's right to exist within secure borders, and to be treated no worse, and no better, than any other country. Argue the actual point. Or perhaps he can't?

"Millicent Bystander" (good name, is she also a member of the Millicent Tendency?) seems not to have grasped the essential distinctions between monogamous Anglican Christianity and polygamous Islam, in which women have half the legal standing of men. May I suggest, just for a start, a thoughtful reading of the marriage service in the 1662 Prayer Book (1928 in the USA), as a guide to the English Church's views of the proper relations between man and wife? And then a comparison with Koranic rules?

Poor old Sherlock Holmes is dragged into this. Conan Doyle made it absolutely clear that Watson fiercely disapproved of Holmes's Cocaine habit. And the reason why there were no laws on the subject at the time was that these drugs were barely used at all, and there was no need. One thing I can guarantee, however. Had Holmes smoked dope instead of shag, none of those mysteries, from the Hound of the Baskervilles to the Final Problem, would ever have been solved. The great detective, a giggling nobody in a squalid set of rooms in Baker Street, would have ended up staring into space in a lunatic asylum. And Professor Moriarty would no doubt have been a leading light in the campaign to legalise Cannabis, grateful for its role in saving him from justice.

I am appalled by the pitiful lengths some people will go to, to avoid this simple fact. Dope can and does destroy lives, and the fear of legal punishment is the best ally the friends and families of its potential victims have in protecting the young from the irreversible tragedy of brain damage. Damn all the selfish people who stand by and help these tragedies happen. I have nothing but contempt for their evasion, their lack of seriousness and their dishonesty.

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10 May 2008 11:55 PM

It seems to me that just one ruined life is too high a price to pay for our weak drug laws.

What valuable thing would we lose if cannabis were driven out of our society for ever?

Dope has wrecked tens of thousands of lives and will wreck millions more – those of its users and of their families – if we do not find the resolve to fight it.

A whole generation sniggers smugly about this issue and refuses to take it seriously.

It is this generation that yelped and snarled with selfish outrage when the Government at last showed some signs of doing the one thing that will actually work if only we try it – threatening to punish those who use cannabis. Fear works.

I wonder just how many civil servants, BBC and Guardian journalists, "respected academics" and politicians are concealing serious current drug habits from us.

Given the condescending tone of these people towards anti-cannabis spokesmen during the past week, I think BBC presenters especially should be asked outright on air if they use illegal drugs, or allow their children to do so, if only so that we can enjoy the awkward pauses that follow.

The snivelling claim that they are entitled to a "private life" applies only if their greasy personal habits have no influence on their public behaviour.

But they do. On two of the rare occasions when I was allowed to make the case against dope on the airwaves, I found myself subjected to a stare of pure, undisguised hatred from one BBC presenter, and was angrily harangued after my appearance on a commercial station by a journalist who had been in the studio.

This, you see, is the thing they truly care about.

They pretend to be worried about dictatorship in Burma or hunger in Africa or the oppression of women in the Muslim world. But that's just dinner-party fake concern.

The real issue for the 1968 generation has always been their right to have fun, however much it costs other people.

So they have promoted ways of behaviour, sexual rules and a drug culture that were bad enough on the college lawns of Oxford and Cambridge in 1968, and that are plain disastrous among the dead mattresses and burned-out cars on the sink estates of post-industrial Britain.

But rather than give up their delights, they are content to see the poor go to hell.

Their one line of defence is that drink and tobacco are just as bad, and they're legal.

Well, I'm more than happy to use the criminal law against these things, too. In fact, we already do, rather effectively – as the drink-driving laws and the tightening ban on public smoking show.

If we could see just half a dozen rock stars, rock brats, BBC presenters and politicians doing time for cannabis possession, then I think I can guarantee you a satisfying drop in cannabis use, and a general improvement in the mental health of the nation.

All we need to do now is dissolve the wretched Association of Chief Police Officers, those liberal friends of crime, and enforce the law of the land.___________________________________________________________________

Sixty years on, it is still Israel that faces persecution

Israel's 60th birthday provides an excuse for a lot of liberal humming and hawing by people who face no threat of being exterminated or driven mad with persecution because they have the wrong genes.

They go on about the 1967 and 1973 wars, and romantic battlefield heroes such as Moshe Dayan, to show they're open-minded, and then add some obligatory sniffling about the plight of the Arab refugees.

A fat lot they actually care about the refugees, who would have been resettled years ago if the Muslim world hadn't decided to use them as propaganda pawns and keep them in slums.

Who now talks about the millions of refugees from Indian partition in 1947? Or the millions of Germans driven from Poland and the Czech lands in 1948?

Or the many Jews driven from the Arab countries and resettled in Israel?

Nobody. Somehow they don't count.

Maybe if Israel can survive till its 200th birthday, it can achieve the same status as Australia and the USA, whose people also live on land from which refugees were driven.

But I doubt it. Israel alone gets attacked for this, and will alone be attacked for as long as it exists.

This selective hostility has one simple explanation – the same nasty prejudice that led to Israel existing in the first place.

All I ask is that the people who single out the Jewish state, while ignoring similar wrongdoing by other states and peoples, recognise themselves for what they are, and stop pretending to be crusaders for justice.___________________________________________________________________

There are no pious sharp elbows in my Bible, Mr Cameron

Now that the Blairite liberal elite have decided that our welfare state will be safe in the hands of the Unconservative Party, David Cameron is immune from criticism (except here).

Worse, Mr Cameron's strange, socialist desire to send his daughter to a (totally untypical) state school will be excused by almost everyone, especially all the silly Tory loyalists who cannot see that Mr Cameron is the new Blair in every way.

As long as the privileged can get special schooling for their children, through money, noisy piety or string-pulling, they can forget the poor, whose sons and daughters must endure one of the worst education systems in the advanced world.

Mr Cameron seems to have obtained this place through a lot of churchgoing and such like.

One day perhaps he will explain how he squares all this busy holiness with his belief in using "sharp elbows" to get rare places in good state schools.

My edition of the Bible doesn't seem too keen on elbowing the poor out of the way. ___________________________________________________________________

Once again, my reminder that the facts don't support claims of a Conservative revival have got me into trouble with Tory loyalists.

They accuse me of always attacking David Cameron and never attacking Gordon Brown.

Not true. I have been attacking Mr Brown, who refuses even to speak to me, these ten years.

But how did Mr Brown get there? Because a media frenzy of love for Mr Blair stopped many people realising the true character of his government.

And now a similar craze for Mr Cameron is stopping them thinking about what his government might really be like.

Tell me, all you loyalists, have you noticed Mr Cameron promising to reverse Mr Brown's raid on pensions? No, and you won't.

He's already spent the money on future plans to be nice to hoodies.___________________________________________________________________

So CCTV cameras don't actually work against crime? What a surprise.

Can we please now get rid of them, and replace them with that brilliant device for keeping order – constables patrolling on foot?___________________________________________________________________

I have little doubt that the police shooting of Mark Saunders in London will be found to have been lawful by an independent inquiry.

People who start gun battles with the police in Chelsea are asking for quite a lot of trouble.

But two things worry me.

If the police are let off when they kill or hurt people while quite reasonably defending themselves, then why aren't law-abiding citizens given more freedom to do the same?

And how is this sort of killing different from an actual execution – except that there is no charge, no trial, no evidence, no defence, no jury, no chance of appeal or reprieve?

Yet by arming the police (as we have) we make such unofficial, drumhead capital punishment inevitable.

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08 May 2008 11:34 AM

I am travelling this week and haven't time for a full posting. And I feel we've been over the ground of the Tory Party quite enough - though it's clear from some contributions that some people still don't follow. Mr "Demetriou" asks for "evidence" of the left-wing establishment's wish to save the Tory Party when it almost collapsed under IDS. I refer him to the coverage of the Michael Howard takeover in the BBC and the grand press at the time - the floating of the idea, presumably originating from what are called 'friends' of Mr Howard, the support for it, the sympathetic coverage of it, the reluctance to criticise Mr Howard's assumption of the leadership in what was virtually a coronation( compare and contrast the endless sniping at Gordon Brown for having assumed the Labour leadership without a contest). Now, since the journalists involved are of the established left which took power in the media post-1968, and since they ostensibly wish to see the Tory Party beaten at any election, why should they wish to see it saved? Why not just stand by and let it collapse, as it would have done without the Howard takeover - after all, IDS was the last fairly elected choice of the Tories, who knew his faults and disadvantages in detail when they chose him. Subsequent leaderships of the Tory Party have been umpired, and in my view shaped, by the media. I refer him, also, to the fascinating remarks by Peter Kellner on this very subject which I quoted on this blog some months ago.

Padraig O' Ryan, I think, answers his own question, but doesn't seem to realise it. It's amazing how many people still think we have a conservative establishment. But can people please refrain from using words such as 'paranoia' in political discussion, unless they are qualified psychiatrists?

Boris Johnson won London despite being a member of the Tory Party, not because of it, a fact he clearly recognised in his acceptance speech. I don't believe he was listed as being one of 'David Cameron's Conservatives' on the ballot paper, as the luckless Tony Lit was. Nor will he be able to run London in a conservative way. You might as well try to fly a submarine, or eat soup with a fork. The GLA is designed, by its boundaries, its constitution and everything else about it, as a focus of left-liberal power, and an elected mayor is a thoroughly unBritish institution, being based on a republican, presidential system in which the elected monarch is much more powerful than the legislature.

James Halifax asks if the Tories wouldn't ruin the country more slowly than Labour. Personally, I doubt it ( see specially grammar schools as an example of their higher speed in wrecking good things) But even if this were so, would it be a recommendation? Perhaps they would, but because their existence prevents the emergence of a party that would not ruin the country at all ,they would also ruin it more surely.

Winston Churchill is not 'my hero' as Mike Williamson says. I have no heroes, preferring to praise individual actions .

In answer to 'David' I do not say that the Tories would do well if they followed my admittedly wild and raving extremist programme ( national independence, serious welfare reform, good schools, strong families, punishment for criminals and other beyond-the-pale ideas). I say that the Tories are so loathed that nothing, not even my sensible ideas, can save them. Is that clear now? Gosh,I do hope so. Also, he appears not have read what I wrote. 44% of 35% is not specially impressive ( in fact I believe it adds up to slightly more than 15% of the electorate). What's more it may itself be an exaggeration. the percentages given for vote share are in any case crude extrapolations from small samples, not a serious totting up of actual votes. North Tyneside is also not Newcastle upon Tyne, where the Tories continue to be insignificant.

Now, to the extraordinary film 'The Lion has Wings' which I managed to watch for the first time at the weekend. This a major propaganda movie made in the early months of World War Two, when Neville Chamberlain was still Prime Minister, and neither Dunkirk nor the Battle of Britain had yet taken place. Though air battles are shown ( very unconvincingly) there is no mention of radar, still secret.

Two things are very striking. One, it pictures Britain as a Fabian Social Democratic paradise of sunlit new council flats and houses, paid holidays, airy new schools and hospitals - all Chamberlain's priorities. Look Chamberlain up and you will find that he wouldn't call himself a 'Conservative', preferring the word 'Unionist' . The film spends its first ten minutes complaining that all these worthy social programmes will have to suffer because Britain must now go (expensively) to war. This strongly backs up Paul Addison's argument, in 'The Road to 1945', that Britain was already an advanced welfare state by 1939 under the Tories, and that Labour's claim to have begun the welfare state after 1945 isn't true.

The other is that all references in the film to bombing Germany stress that the targets are military, not undefended cities. This as very much British policy until May 1940, when the decision was taken to bomb German cities. Until them such a form of warfare was regarded with horror. The weird decision to guarantee Polish independence in March 1939 is glossed over, as well it might be. So is the Molotov Ribbentrop Pact.

Such films, like old guidebooks, encyclopaedias and advertisements, often give a far better guide to how the past actually was than histories written with a consciousness of what happened next.

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03 May 2008 8:19 PM

Why is the Left-wing BBC trying so hard to persuade us that the Tories are on the way back? Why do you think?

Because the Tories have become Left-liberals, like the BBC. So the BBC now like them, and you shouldn't.

But it's worse than that. The ludicrous, portentous and wrong coverage of Thursday's local elections spread well beyond the BBC.

Consider what actually happened, as opposed to what you have been told by all the journalistic sheep who proclaimed a Tory triumph.

Turnout in the local elections was a piffling 35 per cent.

General Election turnout is almost twice that.

Most of those who didn't vote will be Labour supporters who will probably stir themselves at a real election.

Yes, Labour rightly did badly. But the Tories, equally rightly, didn't do well.

Why claim that they did? The Tories are still tiny or non-existent in almost all the major cities of the North of England. Their trumpeted recapture of Bury – which they should never have lost – is paltry.

London is now a separate country with its own rules. Boris Johnson and Ken Livingstone are independent brands, semi-detached from their parties.

As for the rest of the country, here's a small example, familiar to me.

On Thursday night, the Tories lost their pathetic two seats in the City of Oxford, which were theirs only because of defections from the Liberals.

Until quite recently, they ran the city and held both its seats in Parliament.

The Tories are still quite capable of losing the next General Election. Even if they do manage to win it, they will govern almost exactly as Gordon Brown.

Nothing will change except the face and the accent.

Something very similar happened in 1997. Millions were persuaded by conformist media coverage to vote against John Major because he was ghastly and boring and Anthony Blair was pretty and charming.

And when it was all over, the Government was almost exactly the same – high taxes, slovenly services, hundreds of thousands of people in baseball caps living off the State, feeble police and courts, mass immigration. You know the sort of thing.

Real changes in British politics don't come at elections, where we increasingly do as we are told and elect whatever is put in front of us.

They come in the form of establishment palace revolutions, helped by the media.

The biggest was the merciless public knifing of Margaret Thatcher in 1990, when she realised the true nature of the EU and began to oppose it.

But around the same time was the orchestrated takeover of the Labour Party by the constitutional, cultural and sexual revolutionaries who now run it – and who are good friends and neighbours of the people who now run the Tories.

Then there was the extraordinary destruction of Iain Duncan Smith as Tory leader and his replacement by Michael Howard, who proceeded to act as a sort of dictator, sacking Right-wing candidates whose views embarrassed him.

The Left-wing media were once again deeply involved in what was an establishment effort to save the Tory Party from collapse.

Why did the Left suddenly fall in love with Mr Howard, whom they used to loathe? Why did they want to save the Tory Party?

Because they feared that, if it collapsed, a proper pro-British Party might rise from the ruins, a possibility they dread.

And finally there was the media-led coronation of David Cameron as Tory leader, another Establishment intervention to make sure that the Conservative Party stayed firmly in what they call "the centre" – ie pro-EU, anti-education, pro-immigration, committed to high spending and high taxes and a monstrous welfare state, useless to any decent, hard-working person.

The Establishment know that Labour are unpopular, as of course they should be. They are unpopular because their policies are stupid and wrong.

But the Establishment want to keep the policies. So at the next Election they aim to provide a safety valve for angry voters – a chance to choose different faces, but the same awful Government.

Then, after a bit of that, it will be back to Labour again.

The only way to break this cycle is to refuse to join the game, and refuse to be fooled into electing Mr Phoney Blameron.

You ask: "How can he possibly be worse than Gordon Brown?" Just you wait and see.

A squalid game that steals young minds

Could it possibly be bad for a child or a teenager to spend long hours impersonating a violent car thief?

Old-fashioned childhood games did at least have goodies and baddies – and the goodies were supposed to win.

But Grand Theft Auto, the squalid mind poison now going on the market in its latest version, assumes that wickedness, callousness and violence are cool, and has no goodies at all.

The consumers of this mental slurry all maintain that it's just a game and has no effect on them.

But isn't the most potent brainwashing the kind you aren't aware of? When do you find out that you are a desensitised amoral husk, capable of dreadful actions you once couldn't have contemplated? When it's too late.

In the US, the game has been accused of influencing several young men into committing violent crimes.

Of course, these claims cannot be proved conclusively. But it is in our imaginations that we solve moral problems.

If our imaginations are full of the toxic fantasies of Grand Theft Auto, more realistic every time it is "improved", aren't we more likely to make the wrong choice?

Like poor Joyce and Sybil, we've all been conned

We were told that the civil partnership laws were all about compassion.

We were persuaded that, without these changes, long-standing homosexual couples would be forced to sell their homes to pay death duties when one of them died.

It was their 'Human Right' not to suffer this.

Well, where's the compassion, or the "Human Rights" when sisters Joyce and Sybil Burden seek the same privileges? Nowhere to be seen.

The thing was a fraud. It wasn't about kindness at all, only about furthering the sexual revolution.

________________________________________________________________

Those who tell me there's nothing to worry about and we are not a nation in moral decline need to explain why school crossing ladies now need spy cameras in their lollipops to catch people who plough on past, knowing there are children crossing.

Moral panic? Or real danger?

________________________________________________________________

Lord Laidlaw says he is a "sex-addict".

Actually he's just a dirty old man, in the same way that alleged "bulimic" John Prescott is a greedy fat pig.

But the fact that supposedly educated people take his Lordship's claim of "addiction" seriously tells you something you badly need to know – but which is almost unsayable in a society where nobody's to blame for anything.

There's no such thing as "addiction".

People take drugs, smoke, drink too much and eat until they turn into lard balloons because they want to, more than they want to stop.